Thursday, January 27, 2011

Plan for the future -- I want to knit a little troupe (horde?) of feminist Uruk Hai. Why? An awful pun of course:

It is an army bred for a single purpose: to destroy the world of Men.

The plan is to make up a simple Uruk Hai pattern, and replace the 'white hand' logo with a feminist sign. The hard part, I think, will be figuring out what distinguishing features the Uruk Hai have which make them different from any other small green humanoids?

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Ok, new project! Following on from the 'e' scarf, I'm planning to make a second scarf from the same wool. The concept of this is a little hard to explain.Fortunately it's easier to describe the design itself -- it will be a plain grey scarf, embroidered in the multi-coloured yarn with "+5 resistance to predicates".So, why? It's similar to Tea Cosy of +4 Wellness I made a while back (and hence to Cayenne's original on which this was based). This refers to role-playing games, in which objects can add or subtract different attributes from players.And predicates. People define themselves in many different ways, and each of these definitions comes with a range of expected behaviours. Often, I think, people seek out identities in order to know what they should do. By "resistance to predicates", I mean the opposite of this, creating your own identity rather than using a pre-made pigeonhole. It's also intended to be a bit silly -- predicates include any property which can be assigned to a thing, so it's a bit ludicrously broad to claim resistance to them all (and probably counts as a predicate itself).

So yes, bit of an odd project, and rather hard to explain. And possibly involving misrepresentations of grammar. But hey, complicated is good!Hugh.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Hi folks.This is a quick, simple little stripy scarf, made mostly because I like the idea of contrasting multi-coloured yarn with a nice solid main colour.The design is based on the number 'e', or Euler's number. It's a remarkable number, and I'd say it's the second most important irrational number out there, and rather sadly neglected.Euler's number is the base of the natural logarithm, as well as cropping up in differential equations, limits of sequences, and compound interest. It's also related to pi by the rather amazing equation e^(i*pi)=-1.

So, the scarf -- the lengths of the stripes represent the digits of e: the first stripe has 2 rows, the second 7, the third 1, and so on, giving e=2.71... (In fact it uses pairs of rows, since this makes the colours come out nicer)As with most irrationals, unless you know exactly what you're looking for the pattern appears to be random, so it's just a nice stripy scarf.